Title: The Turing Test
Author: Chris Beckett
Link: http://www.chris-beckett.com/short-stories/168/the-turing-test-2/
Collection: The Turing Test
Publisher: Elastic Press
Release date: 2008 (originally published in Interzone, 2002)

One of Chris Beckett’s great strengths as a writer is his capacity for capturing the human story behind the science-fictional situations he creates. The title story of his Edge Hill Prize-winning collection The Turing Test is a fine example of this.

The Turing test is a means of assessing whether an artificial intelligence can convince as human when interacting with a person. The virtual p.a. which arrives in gallery manager Jessica’s inbox one day passes the Turing test disconcertingly well, and causes Jessica to ask uncomfortable questions about her life.

‘The Turing Test’ is a simply superb character study. Jessica is shown as being insecure in herself, despite her success (one of her first actions on being presented with this image of a beautiful young woman is to change its avatar into “a likeable looking woman of about my own age, bright, sharp, but just sufficiently below me both in social status and looks to be completely unthreatening”); and disconnected from the real world in some ways – for example, Jessica will happily explore the immersive virtual worlds offered by her computer, even the sinister Night Street with its “sense of lurking danger”; but she has no desire whatsoever to spend time in a real street of that kind.

Jessica’s life is full of this kind of distancing: her gallery displays work containing human body parts, but she can be dismissive of the feelings of those related to the deceased (“What was [the human head used in one sculpture], after all, once removed from the context of a gallery, but a half kilo of plasticised meat?”); she lives in a “subscriber area”, tucked away from people who haven’t been cleared of being a security risk; she has a trophy boyfriend, but there’s no real substance to the relationship. In the end, Jessica’s greatest fear – though Beckett never says this in so many words – is not that an AI could pass the Turing test too well, but that she herself may not be able to pass it at all.

‘The Turing Test’ is a rich, rewarding piece of fiction that merits re-reading (I’ve read it three times now, and each time I have found something new in it), and a clear demonstration of why Chris Beckett’s work deserves your attention.

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